SOURCE: Postema, James. “Edgar Allan Poe's Control of Readers: Formal Pressures in Poe's Dream Poems.” Essays in Literature 18, no. 1 (spring 1991): 68-75.

[In the following essay, Postema studies Poe's attempt to control reader response to his works through the deliberate withholding of information that would allow readers to arrive at alternative interpretations.]

In his “Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe is clearly concerned with how the word-choices, sounds, and rhythms of “The Raven” might control the way readers respond to that poem. Many writers have either supported or denied Poe's claims that he wrote “The Raven” with the reader in mind, but to a surprising extent the discussion of Poe's intended effects on readers has remained largely within the bounds set up by his own theoretical works; at least in the area of criticism, Poe has in fact controlled readers' responses.¹ Instead of arguing about Poe's intentions in the “Philosophy of Composition,” however, we can look to the formal structures of Poe's poems themselves and see that several of them do indeed limit the information they give to readers, thereby governing the roles that readers may play in interpretation of the poems. “Dream-Land” and “Fairy-Land” provide two instructive examples: each poem opens into a fantastic world which defies any interpretations that are based upon readers' everyday experiences, but each poem also offers readers a logical, formal structure that pushes interpretation in a particular direction.

Fifteen years separate these poems; the first version of “Fairy-Land” was published in 1829, while “Dream-Land” appeared in 1844. But they begin with the same premise: in each we see nearly identical images of misty, mystical landscapes obscured by “tears that drip all over,”² scenes which somehow open into larger, more easily visible worlds. The cause of the tears is unclear; they may be evidence of the poetic personae's own unhappiness, or they may simply be metaphorical descriptions of some foggy, rainy state.

What is clear is that because the tears obscure “forms we can't discover” (“FL” [“Fairy Land”], line 3) readers must trust the speaker's description of what lies behind the tears. Each of these works is a dream poem, and Poe's dream poems in particular control readers quite strictly: because such poems depict worlds that differ greatly from the “real” world, they do not allow readers to use everyday logic. We cannot rely on our experience of natural laws to understand “Ulalume” or “The City in the Sea,” for example. We are forced to suspend disbelief more fully in these poems than in other poems.

Readers know from the very beginning of “Fairy-Land” [I] that events in the poem do not operate on normal rational principles. Instead, Poe replaces cause-and-effect logic with metonymic connections: things are related simply because he puts them together. The landscape obscured by tears begins the poem, followed by a scene in which “Huge moons … wax and wane.” But the poem then seems to jump from one discrete scene to another: the moons and other images in the poem don't seem to be obscured by tears; rather, the tears and the moons are only related sequentially, by appearing in the same poem.

The description of the moons begins a chain of metonymic imagery that stretches throughout “Fairy-Land.” In lines 9-10 the moons acquire faces, from which they can “put out the star-light”; a concealed metaphor here equates star-light with a candle, which can be blown out by a breath. In lines 12-14 the moons decide by “trial” which of them is “the best,” with the winner described as “more filmy than the rest.” And in the rest of the poem Poe relates the moon to drapery, to a “labyrinth of light” that “buries” the world beneath, to a “moony covering” which soars with storms in the skies, to a yellow albatross, and to a tent. In the final lines the moon breaks into a shower of “atomies” that come to rest on butterflies' wings.

Poe's reasons for using such metonymic associations may be related to his opinion of the relative imaginative qualities of various figures of speech. Studying Poe's practical criticism, Robert D. Jacobs concludes that “Poe had claimed that metaphor was more imaginative than simile, but he had also suggested that an imaginative poet rarely used figurative language” (282). And Jacobs explains that for Poe, “A figure of speech, insofar as it specifies resemblance between objects, belongs to the real world, the phenomenal world that can be perceived by the senses. … Poe would have had the imagination soar completely beyond actuality” (243). By using metonymic associations, Poe could attempt to do just that, since he could disregard the normal ways in which objects acted and interacted in the world of ordinary experience. But these metonymic deviations make some particular kinds of interpretation difficult, if not impossible: we cannot explain why any one event or image is connected to another, the way we might be able to in a realistic work, nor can we predict any actions or images that will appear next in the poem. The poem cuts itself off from interpretations based on cause-and-effect logic.

Poe further removes the poem from the realm of everyday logic by the use of personification. Butterflies are “never-contented” because the speaker gives them that quality; the moons meet together to decide who will be chosen for the descent to earth because the speaker says they do. It is easy for readers to accept, but impossible to predict, these personifications; we must simply accept Poe's description of the butterflies as malcontents and go on to try to form some interpretation on a different level.

It is possible to do so because Poe presents these images in a literary structure, a plot of sorts. The poem opens with a potential conflict for readers, if not for the speaker, when we first realize that this is a dream poem: the tears of the opening scene (which may or may not be the speaker's tears) obscure the forms of the landscape, imposing blindness and uncertainty on the reader, the protagonist, or both. But the poem progresses from that state to a calm, peaceful description of the moon's setting: its “wide circumference / In easy drapery falls.” In the next few lines we see a catalogue of things lighted by the moon, as it sets

Over hamlets, over halls,
Wherever they may be—
O'er the strange woods—o'er the sea—
Over spirits on the wing—
Over every drowsy thing—
And buries them up quite
In a labyrinth of light—

After the peaceful moonset, this catalogue helps resolve the poem's initial crisis of uncertainty. Even with the connotations of burial in a “labyrinth of light,” the description seems purposefully drawn out to resolve some of the tensions of that initial scene. In the next section, too, the speaker implies that people are going about their usual business in an everyday manner; the moon's dissolution above this normal scene could be interpreted as the coming of daylight and the restoration of clear vision, adding another step in the progression from metonymic uncertainty to a state of resolution.

The catalogue in the center of the poem helps diminish tension in another way, for despite the metonymic string of imagery, the description of the moon's setting in lines 16-24 brings some images together for more clearly rhetorical reasons. A moon could quite naturally appear to settle on the peak of a mountain. This is one of the few images that can correspond realistically to the natural world, providing readers with a more familiar scene. Further, the rest of the catalogue is made up of opposites, so that the name of one in each pair matches the other: poor hamlets suggest rich halls, woods form a parallel to seas, and “spirits on the wing” contrast with drowsy things. With the possible exception of flying spirits, all of these make logical sense when seen in a picture of moonlight, for the moon's spreading light is an image large enough to contain them all. The sense of completeness that this catalogue creates balances much of the uncertainty of the obscuring tears at the beginning: although we are in a different world, we seem to be able to see that world as a whole.

By using this catalogue and the progression of scenes, Poe provides readers with a logical structure that allows a certain kind of understanding of the poem. Readers do not have to accept this structure as a key to the poem's meaning; nor would I argue that all readers will accept it. But by eliminating interpretations based upon ordinary experience, and by providing these literary structures, Poe (whether consciously or not) puts formal pressures on readers to understand “Fairy-Land” in certain ways.

One of those ways is to lessen the reader's sense that he or she must arrive at any one interpretation of this poem. The calmness of the imagery gives the impression that, even if we misinterpret what the speaker is describing to us, nothing will be hurt; we can be wrong without any dire consequences. In everyday life we do not normally see the moon breaking up into a shower of atomies, but when it does so here the result is not cataclysmic upheaval; instead, we see a piece of that moon resting on the “quivering wings” of a rather harmless butterfly. When the moon sets over hamlets and halls, the speaker says, “then, how deep!—O, deep! / Is the passion of their sleep.” But this potentially threatening image is resolved in the next line: “In the morning they arise.”³

“Fairy-Land” [I] thus begins in tension and obscurity but progresses to an essentially peaceful state, and in doing so the poem reduces the importance of getting any exact interpretation correct. Instead, we are left with an impression that the poem is a complete narrative sequence of imaginative events in a pleasantly unreal world. The meaning of those events is not completely clear, but neither is the need for attaching a specific meaning to them.⁴

“Dream-Land,” on the other hand, is a much darker poem. Like “Fairy-Land,” it begins by letting readers know clearly that they are in an unreal world, but here Poe's poetic persona says so directly. Poe does not use metonymy so heavily in this poem; in the introduction he states that this is a world “Out of Space—out of Time,” a kingdom ruled by Night. Poe even calls that Night an “Eidolon,” making sure that readers know they are in ideal, unreal surroundings. After describing tears that obscure vision, as in “Fairy-Land,” the speaker takes us through an unsettled landscape, scenes constructed differently from those in “Fairy-Land.” All the images in this part of “Dream-Land” come from the natural world, yet nothing here has any natural bounds—we see “bottomless vales” and “lakes that endlessly outspread.” The unbounded elements constantly intermingle as well: the poem describes “Seas that restlessly aspire, / Surging, unto skies of fire,” and “Mountains toppling evermore / Into seas without a shore.”

This world not only exists outside the realm of our experience, but is contradictory to what we know; we can put together the words boundless and seas, as Poe has, but our minds cannot comprehend boundless seas, let alone shoreless seas with mountains falling into them. While Poe as poet can form such antithetical constructions, for us as readers, according to Roy Harvey Pearce, the words he uses are still “ineradicably tainted by the reality of the things and states to which they [refer]” (150). The fantastic world here does not rely on metonymy, as it does in “Fairy-Land,” but the effect of those oxymorons is the same for readers as with metonymy: because ordinary logic does not apply, we have to look elsewhere for clues to an interpretation of the poem.

Poe heightens our sense of unreality in this realm with his description of mountains “toppling evermore,” suggesting an existential insecurity and impermanence—there is quite literally no firm ground here. Yet by making the mountains topple eternally, Poe not only creates that insecurity but gives it a sort of permanence: readers can be sure that the mountains always will be falling. However, knowing this doesn't give readers any alternate structure for understanding the poem; rather, it reinforces the impression of anxiety. The idea of constancy in the mountains' constant falling reminds us that we can conceive of some sort of stable, permanent state in which we could rest, some rational interpretation of the poem; yet the constant falling also reassures us that such rest is completely unreachable. Unlike the moons in “Fairy-Land,” which eventually coalesce into a single moon, the recurrences here do not allow us any sense of closure or intellectual security.⁵

After this section, however, the poem moves back into more conventional imagery, with shrouded and white-robed figures walking around doing things that shrouded forms are supposed to do: “forms of friends long given, / In agony, to the Earth,” they “start and sigh.” These symbols are less powerful than earlier scenes because they already fit into widely accepted schemes of what death and the dead are like, in Poe's time as well as our own. But readers also can feel a little more secure in contemplating such figures because, even though the ghosts are in a morbid world, the idea of ghosts already exists in a context outside of the speaker's personal vision. They allow readers to feel again that they can see a larger, more coherent picture of this strange realm.⁶

Less clear than the symbolism of these figures is the reason why the traveler “May not—dare not openly view” this world. We learn that the unseen King of “Dream-Land” has decreed that “Never its mysteries are exposed / To the weak human eye unclosed,” perhaps suggesting that only the dead may look with impunity on sad waters and skies of fire. Yet the speaker is presumably human, if not alive, again creating self-contradictions in the speaker's statements. The “fringed lid” and “darkened glasses” necessary here also return us to less conventional images, ones that can carry some of the speaker's anxious view of this world without seeming trite (as some of the ghost imagery does). Again, these images remove the poem from the world of everyday experience, eliminating one kind of interpretation.

Yet, as he does in “Fairy-Land,” Poe includes in “Dream-Land” some structures that give readers direction for interpretations. The tone of these contradictory images is fairly consistent: while we cannot understand the world here logically, we can say that it is—uniformly—not a pleasant one. From the insecurity of “mountains toppling” to the projected emotions of “lone waters,” the poem has a dark, morbid tone. If this is indeed the realm of Night and of death, such morbid images make sense. So does the illogical nature of the region: visual perception breaks down at night, just as our experiential wisdom cannot understand the world of the dead. The poem thus turns on itself: the qualities that make it hard to understand end up serving as clues for interpretation; because we cannot interpret the poem's existential insecurity on an experiential level, we can see it as a statement about a world that is not secure and does not submit itself to everyday logic—the realm of Death. The poem's illogic becomes logical.

In the conclusion, Poe repeats the first six lines of the poem almost identically. In some ways nothing has changed since the beginning of the poem; the static, yet dynamic, world of the poem is apparently continuing in its cycles of destruction, but we still have no idea of how the narrator could survive in such a strange world.

By repeating these lines, Poe also creates a structure that allows no closure in the poem, even though the speaker has returned safely. He does not show a progression of images that comes to a close, as in “Fairy-Land,” nor does he even relate the frame of the introduction and conclusion directly to the interior of the poem (in Mabbott's edition, as well as in others, they are separated by spaces). Instead, we see a speaker returning (again) from a strange land, suggesting a cycle that will be repeated, just as the mountains fall again and again into “boundless floods.” But this lack of closure implies a kind of closure, an insecure security, as does the uncertain certainty of “mountains toppling evermore.” The structure of “Dream-Land” does not allow any narrative closure, as “Fairy-Land” does; nor does it let us arrive at a final meaning. But that is in itself a meaning. The poem is about a “Dream-Land,” one that cannot be dealt with on ordinary logical terms nor, as Poe here suggests, on conventional literary terms.

“Dream-Land” is harder for readers to deal with than “Fairy-Land” because the formal structures it offers to readers are thinner. While “Fairy-Land” presents a coherent plot that arrives at a resolution, this poem has no formally concluded narrative: the speaker simply ends the poem by stopping in the middle of an impossible description of a weird landscape, saying that now he or she has returned from that world. “Fairy-Land” offers the rhetorically structured catalogue of opposites that are all included in the moon's setting light, but here in “Dream-Land” the rhetoric itself is undermined by syntactic contradictions like “boundless floods.” The only structures that readers may use to build an interpretation of “Dream-Land” are the poem's consistent inconsistencies: its morbid tone, its lack of a logical structure.

In this poem, then, Poe controls readers and their interpretations by default. He denies readers the use of experiential knowledge in understanding the world of “Dream-Land,” and he builds the poem around a journey that seems never to come to an end, thus eliminating any resolution on a formal level. The only interpretation available to us is simply to take his word that this is a world “Out of Space—Out of Time,” and to leave it at that: we can make no interpretation, other than what he gives us, because nothing in the poem allows us to agree or disagree with what the speaker says. Poe thus creates the kind of controlling structure in “Dream-Land” that in “The Philosophy of Composition” he said he wanted to create: a poem that limits readers so severely that they must accept his interpretation. In effect, readers do not interpret here; they simply read.

Notes

1. To my knowledge, the only two critics who go beyond restatement to consider Poe's ideas about his readers as readers are Robert D. Jacobs and George Kelly. Jacobs discusses Poe's normative psychology in making assumptions about a mass audience of journal readers (Poe 436). Kelly sees Poe's movement of “the point of critical focus away from the work of art to its interpreter” as a “drift toward subjectivism”; Kelly uses his own description of this drift as an opening statement, against which he contrasts what he sees as the objective strategies by which Poe “contravened” such a drift (35).

   Edward H. Davidson (esp. 67-75), Charles Feidelson, Jr., Albert Gelpi, T. S. Eliot, and Allen Tate discuss on a general level Poe's ideas about the power of language and the limits he could not overcome.

2. Texts for both poems are taken from Thomas Ollive Mabbott's edition of Poe's texts.

3. Compare Davidson's remarks on “Fairy-Land”: “nothing happens; no one really dies or lives; the moon and sun remain the same; only the protagonist who has ‘seen’ these things is changed” (31). While one might question whether or not the protagonist changes (if we see enough of this person even to call him or her a protagonist), Davidson and other critics generally agree about the light tone of this poem. Kent Ljungquist, Jacobs, and Mabbott all comment on its humor as well.

4. I have been using the first version of “Fairy-Land,” which Poe wrote in 1829. He revised this poem in 1831, soon after the first version was published; the short time between revisions suggests that he was unhappy with his first drafts. As Mabbott remarks in his introduction to the second version, “Fairy-Land” [II] is “virtually a new poem, with an effect of its own” (161) because of Poe's many changes. It is interesting to note that one of his major changes was to anchor the description of “tears that drip all over” in a scene where the persona speaks to a woman named Isabel; the poem becomes in part a description of a vision addressed to her. Isabel's presence brings the poem closer to the realm of everyday experience, though the speaker wonders whether or not the spot where they sit and where the moon-beam fell is “all but a dream.” Poe also adds another interpretive level to the poem this way, since the relation between the speaker and this woman gives readers more grounds for speculation.

5. Critics have offered various interpretations of the imagery in this poem. Davidson sees “Dream-Land” as “a place where everything that exists is in a state of disintegration, as though all matter and form were returning to its primordial condition of mere atomicity” (82). While this view is consistent with the tone of the poem, it fails to emphasize the eternal quality of the disintegration. Arthur Hobson Quinn remarks that Poe “produces the effect of vastness and desolation by his usual methods of denying limitations” (416).

6. William M. Forrest and Mabbott (346) also see some Biblical imagery in “Dream-Land,” especially in this latter half. Forrest cites, for example, “the spirit that walks in shadow” (line 41) and “Behold it but through darkened glasses” (line 50) as derived from scripture (171). While Killis Campbell doubts the likelihood of Poe's direct borrowing from the Bible (547), images such as spirits and shadows are at any rate common in our culture.

Works Cited

Campbell, Killis. The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957.

Davidson, Edward H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1957.

Eliot, T. S. “From Poe to Valery.” The Hudson Review 2 (1949): 327-42.

Feidelson, Charles. “Poe.” Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953.

Forrest, William M. Biblical Allusions in Poe. New York: Macmillan, 1928.

Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975.

Jacobs, Robert D. Poe: Journalist & Critic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

———. “The Self and the World: Poe's Early Poems.” The Georgia Review 31 (1977): 638-68.

Kelly, George. “Poe's Theory of Unity.” Philological Quarterly 37 (1958): 34-44.

Ljungquist, Kent. “Poe's ‘The Island of the Fay’: The Passing of Fairyland.” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 265-71.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. “Poe.” The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961. 141-53.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poems. Vol. 1 of Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1969.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson, Edgar Allan Poe; A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton, 1941.

Tate, Allen. “The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words.” Kenyon Review 14 (1952): 455-75.